The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography

Claire Cochrane, Jo Robinson

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350336216
• eBook ISBN: 9781350034303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Shortlisted for the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography is an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers the key themes and methods that are current in theatre history research, with a particular focus on expanding the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are eighteen specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their 'local' landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draws on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the Handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, as well as providing up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field. Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

Why in the transition from future to past, should the present not be the time of initiative – that is, the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible action.¹

Ricoeur 1985: 208

The material traces of the history of theatre may be found anywhere in the world that has been associated with the phenomenon of performance. A randomly selected and by no means exhaustive list of those traces could include carved, painted or photographed images; outdoor gathering places; architectural remains or fully functioning buildings; artefacts such as masks, musical instruments, mimetically significant clothing, properties and scenic pieces; documents – inscribed on a range of mediums – of play texts, codes of practice, inventories, contracts, receipts, maps, letters, journals, newspapers, postcards and, since the late nineteenth century, recorded voices and filmed action. Along with, or sometimes instead of, the preserved concrete traces, there might also remain embodied or cognitive traces, bearing witness to the way the body and mind recall and reproduce the experience of performance through time.

That our collective understanding of the concept of theatre as cultural practice has been significantly enlarged and diversified over the last 100 years or so is largely, we would argue, due to the development of theatre history as a recognized academic discipline within which successive generations of scholars have worked to identify, verify and shape the traces of theatre into descriptive and analytic narratives of past experience. It is not our intention in this handbook to produce a comprehensive history of theatre history, but the genealogy of our discipline – the extent to which it is in a constant state of evolution and renegotiation – is of importance to our apprehension of where we are now and our capacity to make, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, ‘the present ... the time of initiative’ in the interests of the future. Of particular importance to this goal is our attempt to broaden the international scope of our discussion by actively seeking greater knowledge of other traditions and authorities of theatre history. Our aim is thus to go some way towards mitigating the effects of what the Indian scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty has called ‘asymmetric ignorance’ – a concern to which we return later in this introduction (1992: 2).

Accounts disseminated from within the Anglo-American and European academies of the origins of theatre history as a distinctive university discipline usually foreground the work in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century of Max Herrmann in Berlin and (less prominently) Hugo Dinger in Jena (Quinn 1991). What was initiated through lectures, scholarly associations, individual books, serial publications and so on culminated in the case of Herrmann in the founding in 1923 of the Theaterwissenschaftliches Institute in Berlin. The activities of the Theaterwissenschaft group of German-language scholars – which saw institutes and museums established in Cologne, Kiel, Munich and Vienna – were inevitably shattered by the Second World War, but remain firmly associated with the ‘scientific’ method of historical enquiry and the pursuit of objective ‘facts’ derived from the rigorous scrutiny of collected documentary and artefactual evidence. Almost simultaneously in North America, the appointment in 1899 of Brander Matthews to the very first US chair of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York reinforced an academic tradition of locating the study of theatre within departments of literature, thus prioritizing the dramatic text and the study of ‘great’, mostly European, canonical playwrights.

As Marvin Carlson has recently emphasized, what was pioneering about both Herrmann and Matthews was the insistence that the play as a text on the page could only be reimagined and revitalized for the stages of their own time through an understanding of the original performance conditions: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the foundation of modern theatre studies was grounded upon a spatial reorientation – from the linear reading of drama to the three-dimensional staging of it’ (Carlson 2010: 195–6). Institutionalizing theatre studies, and thus by extension theatre history, within university departments irrespective of their broader disciplinary orientation, however, took the scholarly practice of theatre history into what is effectively a gladiatorial arena. Academics argue with each other, and as they do so conceptual frameworks and the theoretical underpinning of basic methodologies shift and change. The result – as we hope the work included in this handbook amply demonstrates – is a richer, more inclusive, democratically aware and self-reflexive approach to the challenges of the discipline. The problem, however, as the US-based historian Ellen Mackay has pointed out, is that theatre history ‘perpetually re-begins itself’. Past scholarship is purged: ‘in pursuit of a cleaner slate, much of what has been said before must be discarded’ (2010: 23). Furthermore, the tendency to construct binary oppositions out of favoured subject matter and methodologies has the capacity to both oversimplify and distort historical understanding.

Within the late-twentieth-century climate of postmodernism and the rejection of positivist adherence to demonstrable facts, there still appears to be a need to call into question the ‘scientific’ method, mostly now referring back to the work of A. M. Nagler, the Austrian-American heir to the Theaterwissenschaft tradition through his influential A Source Book in Theatrical History, which was published in 1952. In her New Readings in Theatre History (2003), the British historian Jacky Bratton targets both strands of the early-twentieth-century academic legacy through her interrogation of meticulous fact-checking, taking as an example the ‘archaeo-historicism’ of Robert D. Hume, best known for his research in late-seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century British theatre. Bratton sets out to demonstrate the ways in which powerful literary figures in the British cultural elite appropriated what was to be best known of nineteenth-century British theatre history, in a push towards a focus on canonical literary drama. Such a focus had a doubled effect on the history of British theatre: it occluded the importance of mass popular theatre, and discounted the value of those distinctly non-literary evidentiary traces capable of imbuing the records of the past with felt life. Bratton has, for UK theatre historians, been an important influence in returning scholarly attention to both these aspects of theatre history.

The writing of this introduction has also been influenced by another very recent challenge to the received wisdom about the scholarly basis of British theatre history. Richard Schoch’s vigorously polemical Writing the History of the British Stage 1660-1900 (2016) sets out to restore the legitimacy and credibility of the documented records produced before the advent of the twentieth-century modernist academic. What had been gently disparaged as inaccurate and naïvely anecdotal or pointlessly pedestrian about the various ‘histories’ published by the antiquarians, textual editors, booksellers, journalists and theatrical insiders of the late seventeenth, eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries – 300 years’ worth of thinking about the theatre – should, Schoch suggests, be recognized not merely as miscellaneous sources of fragmentary information to be rummaged through by appropriately trained professional historians, but as historical and indeed historiographic interventions in their own right, each offering distinctive interpretive perspectives. This argument potentially has wider international implications for the reappraisal and re-evaluation of the multiplicitous voices from the past, and suggests the importance of awareness of multiple, previous and ‘other’ historiographical frameworks which must be recognized if we are to fully understand those voices. We should look harder at what has been sedimented in the historical memory: what has been, in Ricoeur’s words, ‘deposited, suspended’. And we should ensure that we bring to those deposits and sediments the frameworks which are appropriate to best understanding and evaluating them. How we look affects what we see; what we see should affect how we look.

Thus, one of the core objectives of this volume is to share and widen knowledge not just of more internationally various theatre histories, but also of the key individuals responsible through time for the transmission of that knowledge. A key question running through the handbook, and one which has motivated our choice of commissioned essays, is that of ‘who speaks in theatre history, and who has the right to speak?’ And what languages do they speak in, and from what contexts? Here, it is worth noting that the development of digital technologies and spaces provides both a potential transformation in terms of not only the methodological tools that we deploy, as Robinson discusses later in this volume, but also our access to knowledge. In some ways, the development of the internet over recent decades has democratized the discussion of theatre history, as it has enabled the creation of a vast repository of enthusiastically acquired information capable of dissemination outside the walls of the academy by aficionados of theatre and performance – who are sometimes understandably oblivious of, or actively resistant to, scholarly authority. This material is potentially a rich resource of audience reception and response, given the centrality of shared emotion and experience to the theatrical encounter, but it is one which can also be potentially overwhelming for the academic researcher: if everyone speaks, who can we hear?

The key difference, we would suggest, and the one which has driven the authorial and editorial imperatives of this volume, is the importance of historiographic understanding to the work which historians do. The Oxford English Dictionary (2002) defines historiography as both the ‘writing of history’ and ‘the study of history-writing’: what we write about, how we write and why we write. Recently, the US-based scholars Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka have offered the pithy definition of ‘the arrangement of the historical record’ (2015: 2): that economy of expression serves to refine to a powerfully constituted core the labour-intensive task of establishing the methodological, ideological and philosophical components of the arrangement. Moreover, in line with a growing preoccupation with the ethical turn in theatre studies, the fundamental responsibility of the historian to find ways to tell a verifiable truth about the past – despite the contested nature of ‘truth’ – demands greater attention to the transparency of the historian’s objectives. In a previous collaboration on a collection of essays – published in 2016 as Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth – and drawing on historiographic expertise in other disciplines, we sought ‘to explore the ways in which theatre historians apply ethical thinking to the truthful representation, recovery or re-visioning of the different ways and means by which theatre-makers in the past have enacted stories or scenarios related to human experience’ (4). There, we cited the German historiographer Jörn Rüsen’s statement that ‘it belongs to the historian’s responsibility to reveal not only those features of the past which fit into the self-esteem of contemporaries, but also to reveal those hidden but effective disturbances in their self-esteem’ (2004: 199); in this volume, too, we seek to encourage awareness in both contributors and readers of how our choices of object, method and perspective affect what and how we see. It is thus important to acknowledge our own positioning and context as theatre historians and historiographers. Who are our contemporaries and forebears, and what are our ingrained approaches and understandings?

As British theatre historians with personal research interests focused on the history of theatre in the UK, much of the record we arrange – and subject to rearrangement – is drawn from the scholarship of British theatre history. Arguably, it is down to the cultural as well as political legacy of the British Empire that the theatre of our small group of islands has attracted the interest of such substantial numbers of international historians especially from (formerly British) North America. However, the founding of the International Federation for Theatre Research/Fédération International pour la Recherche Théâtrale (IFTR/FIRT) in 1955 as a result of an initiative of the British Society for Theatre Research (established in 1948) brought together in its first meeting delegates from twenty-one countries to what was a dual English/French language organization. In France, the Société d’Histoire du Théâtre had been founded in 1932 by August Rondel, the librarian of the Comédie Française. IFTR/FIRT rapidly expanded to draw in theatre and performance scholars from all over the world, and the impact on the discipline of theatre history has been considerable. The majority of the contributors to the Handbook have engaged with IFTR and an important core have been members of the Historiography Working Group. Indeed, the majority of the individual essays included were first discussed at the annual conference held in Stockholm in 2016 when the overarching theme was ‘Presenting the Theatrical Past’. It is also worth reminding ourselves that every scholar who considers her/his field of theatre studies retrospectively has to apply the methodological tools of the historian even if she/he does not self-identify as a historian.

That said, it is our sense that interest in theatre history and historiography has gathered momentum since the beginning of the twenty-first century and the commissioning of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography follows on from the comparatively recent publication of a number of key English-language volumes dedicated to historiographic enquiry. Moreover, although the academic writing is in English – an issue to which we return later in this introduction – and the writers for the most part belong to a community of scholars well known to each other, there is a gathering sense of international engagement, of expanding temporal, spatial, geographical boundaries.

While mindful of the futility of attempting to pinpoint a clearly delineated turning point in the history of a cultural practice, it is convenient for the genealogy of our project if we trace back our particular line of descent to 1989 and the publication by the University of Iowa Press of Interpreting the Theatrical Past. The editors Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie brought together thirteen theatre historians, all but one based at North American universities. The exception, the German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, was then teaching at the University of Bayreuth, but all were effectively in the same debating room in the academy. As Bank and Kobialka point out, the 1989 collection offered no precise definition of historiography (2015: 1). Instead, as the Postlewait/McConachie introduction put it, the intention was not only to identify historiographic problems and issues but also to provide interpretive approaches that apply broadly to theatre and challenge assumptions (ix). The first essay in the collection by R. W. Vince offered a succinct historical survey of the development of the discipline together with a discussion of both ‘sciencing’ and the likely impact of ‘sociocultural’ historians on the broadening of the field. His conclusion, however, betrays a lingering insecurity about status and legitimacy as he asks ‘will theatre history be able to take advantage of new historiographical theories and methods and establish itself as an independent discipline?’ (1989: 16).

Thirty years on from that question, the flourishing of interest in the discipline may be clearly seen in the appearance of a growing number of publications – including those subsequently produced by Vince’s fellow interpretive essayists, Marvin Carlson, Joseph Roach, Tracy Davis, Erika Fischer-Lichte, McConachie and Postlewait – which bear witness to both historiographic ambition and independence. Postlewait’s successor volumes to Interpreting the Theatrical Past – his single-authored The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009) and the 2010 collection of essays, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Charlotte M. Canning – offer still more various perspectives on the discipline. While much of the case-study material in The Cambridge Introduction is drawn from Postlewait’s mainly British theatre specialisms, his valuable interrogation of the evidentiary basis of much established theatre history foregrounds vital questions about the theatre historian’s responsibility to the past as well as providing the reader with key guidelines on methodologies and approaches (guidelines to which we will return throughout this volume). In turn, the fifteen essays collected together in Representing the Past are designed to enable the reader ‘to think with – not just about’ (2010: 9) the five categorical ideas of archive, time, space, identity and narrative. The aim was to engage with ‘some of the fundamental conditions of historical inquiry and understanding’ (3) while still recognizing the importance of new perspectives and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• How to Use This Book
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Research Methods and Methodologies
• 3 Current Research: Case Studies from the Field
• 4 Changing Perspectives and Current Challenges: Introduction
• Works Cited
• Annotated bibliography
• Selected resources
• Index
• Copyright